


Another Mini-Meta: First Impressions.

by Tammany



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Gen, Meta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-30
Updated: 2019-06-30
Packaged: 2020-05-31 02:13:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,401
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19416373
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tammany/pseuds/Tammany
Summary: Just continuing to contemplate the contrast between who our angel and demon try to be seen--and who they keep turning out to be. Focus on the first introduction, with a few detours.I have checked this over. Once. I am sure I've blown the names again, though: I never see it. It's right in the middle of my blind spot. Lemme know so I can fix it?And I hope you enjoy the meta.





	Another Mini-Meta: First Impressions.

It's an old trope: the bad boy and the good. Good girl--good boy. Doesn't matter: the good one. There are variations, but we know what to expect most of the time. The bad boy's the leader. He's proud and bold and he couldn't give a damn what other people think of him. He's a bad influence. He's injured and vulnerable and can only show it to the good one--and the good one, in tender compassion, gives him or herself more and more powerfully to the bad one.   


The bad one is reckless. The good one is wary, hesitant--even a bit too chicken-hearted. The bad one has ideas. The good one has principles. The bad one has imagination. The good one understands consequences.

There are really two ways this is played: either these two are who they choose to appear. Or they are not. The bad boy's bad. He's tough. Vulnerable or not, in the end he's the alpha, the reckless initiator, too tough to live. Goody-two-shoes really is an innocent lamb in the hands of evil--tempted, led astray, in love with a doomed, flawed wreck of an anti-hero.   
  
Or, sometimes, if you're lucky, there's more going on there. They're playing roles, and what's behind the role is more complicated than that.  
  
Good Omens is, of course, more than that, and it tells us so from the first meeting of our two protagonists. 

The set-up tells us who they should be, of course. There's the very devil who tempted Eve in Eden. The serpent of the Garden itself. The initiator of the entire divine melodrama of human sin. Of course he's a bad, bad boy. And Azi? The Angel of the East Gate? The Principality on Apple Tree Duty? What could he possibly be but Heaven's representative, the on-the-ground defender of good and virtue. They are their sides. They are their traditional roles. Eve and Adam will sin, and Azi will turn them forth, barring their way with a flaming sword, casting them out of Eden. We know that Crawly will be cold at the core--cast out of love and wild with envy of his heavenly counterparts. Willing to rule in Hell rather than serve in Heaven. Up to no good. A bad, bad demon indeed. And Azi? You expect him, like Adam and Eve, to be vulnerable to evil. To want love. To seek community. Being the soft-hearted one, you expect him to be the easily swayed one, too. Being the innocent one, you expect him to be the gullible one.

And, yet...and yet...

There it is, at the very start. 

As I wrote before, the angel stands alone. Strong, solitary, struggling with uncertainty even now, on the first day of the rest of creation--the day after the Ineffable Plan of God turns two innocents out of the Garden for a sin they are incapable of understanding, with consequences they could never have foreseen, at a cost they do not yet understand, without a hope of forgiveness. Ineffability is beginning to bother Azi already. Ineffable suggest that it will all come out right in the end--but in the meantime it all looks suspiciously wrong. Azi struggles with it alone.

And along comes the serpent, the cleverest of the beasts of the field. The tempter. Bet he's up to trouble, yeah?

Well. Maybe. But he seems unusually needy, doesn't he? The desperate housewife who won't shut up when she shares the bus-stop with you in the morning. The intimidated young woman who hovers close to you in the bar because she's being hit on, and she doesn't know what to do but find someone who will shelter her. The bored little kid who sits kicking his heels over and over against the stairs of the porch, whining a bit and asking any question just to keep you talking. The one who walked out of the accident whole, sitting in the hospital lounge waiting for the doctor to come explain how the one who didn't walk away really is, and worrying that it was all his fault, somehow, and jawing endlessly to every nurse who passes and to other waiting people as miserable and nervous as he is.

Crowley is lonely-lonely-lonely, and looking for company, and reassurance. That Apple thing: it made so little sense. Why put a forbidden tree in the middle of the safe garden, like a loaded handgun left lying on a toy shelf in the nursery school, ready to attract little hands, appeal to shining, curious eyes, and leave blood and tears in its wake? What did it prove, to commit a sin you had no ability to understand? And the consequences, so out of proportion to the sin...

Crowley, already the victim of the Ineffable plan, is fretful. Worried. Puzzled. Insecure.

The only thing about him that suggests they bad boy he will later pass as is his official role: serpent, demon, tempter of Eve. Everything else suggests nothing of the sort. Even his sarky, skeptical wit is laced with uncertainty and hesitation and fear. He, like Azi, is simply one more bewildered creation in the dark of God's solitaire game, trying to puzzle out the rules and the meaning of the game, and failing. This is no dangerous, "drive too fast for me" bad boy. It's no tempter in the ordinary sense. It's no bad boy. It's a good kid who doesn't understand how it all keeps going wrong.

The scene plays out, a line at a time, a shared hesitant laugh at time, the shared secret--both worried that somehow they don't understand the plan, or know what they're really supposed to be doing, or why. Not good and evil, but two babes in the wood, lost and afraid, there on the parapet of the garden at the beginning of the world. Both looking at the two humans retreating from Eden, flaming sword at the ready. Neither of them is too proud to admit their confusion. From the very start, the question is asked: when it all makes so little sense, when God plays her complicated solitaire game in the dark of her creation, how do angel and demon ever know if they did right, or wrong? Or is the real story, the true narrative, a question of whether they will grow up and define good and evil for themselves, rather than wait passively for God to tell them how it ought to be?  
  
From the very beginning worried Azi makes his own choice. He gives away the sword he was given by God, like a classic fairy-godmother attempting to soften the curse of an evil fairy. "You'll be pricked by a spindle and drop down dead!" No...the good fairy will soften the terms, because the curse wasn't fair. It wasn't right. Azi, uneasy, opts for the right in his own eyes. He's got a moral understanding that is separate from God's.

But so does Crowley. He isn't properly damned. He's the victim of loneliness and rebellious boredom. He sought bad companions, and hungered for a bit of drama...and ended up, like Eve, with a consequence he could not have foreseen. He's still trying to understand. But he's got opinions. The game isn't fair. He just doesn't understand why it's not fair.  
  
And the storm approaches--and any doubt you had whether these two were proper bad boy and good boy is blown away, as Aziraphale raises his wing, and the wicked, sly serpent, the tempter of Eden, the demon of the pit huddles under it, shifts close, body posture meek and welcoming protection. The angel protecting and comforting the little lost black chick...

They never really work as emblems of good and evil. Those are just...faces they wear, to hide themselves, to define themselves, to keep others from judging them in ways that worry them. Crowley may be hot as hell, too cool for school--but he's not convincing as being actually a bad boy. He doesn't want to tempt. He's lazy: its a job, not a calling, and a job he does for a crap outfit led by asshole bosses. He's horrified by God's apparent plan: The dead children. The weird humans who are better at evil than Hell's Minions will ever be--and better at amazing goodness than all the assembled ranks of Heaven. 

He's still not cold, or evil, or bad. He's still not reckless. He's still not the leader--the bad influence. Not in the normal meaning of the world. He's the lonely kid in middle school who keeps showing up, hoping you'll be his friend. He's the outcast trying to figure out what currency has has to offer to be less alone. No matter what his apparent cool is, he keeps showing up seeking Azi out, looking for his companionship, trying to tighten the bonds. He's already trying to create a safe, comforting "our side," to protect him from the crazy world of Heaven and Hell's side and God's Ineffable Plan. He's the one trying to appeal to Azi--and not as a confident seducer, but as a lonely, hungry, insecure character seeking the stability and certainty Azi offers. Azi, for better or worse, at least tries to believe in a meaning and order defined by God and imposed by Heaven. But he, too, is confused. He's so alone, and so little of it seems to make sense. Perhaps the one reliable thing he has is the lonely, geeky demon and his aching need and his cocky bravado in the face of a mad world. The lost chick who huddled under his wing and leaned close in Eden.

Their good-boy/bad-boy dichotomy is costuming. Roles each try to play to provide them with some claim to the positions they're supposed to be playing in the Divine Game. Camouflage to keep the bosses from bothering them. The differences are not good and evil, as such.   
  
And, yet, there is one temptation, that's played over and over. Azi has defined himself by his compassion. He gave away the sword. Yet he and Crowley are both kinder than is good for them, and Crowley proves early on he's uneasy with things like killing kids.   
  
From the start of the formal plot, Crowley tries to lure Azi into taking point in blocking the Antichrist--first through the clever "thwarting" gambit, but by the time the question of the Hell Hound and the 11th birthday come around, Crowley presents what I suspect was always his reluctant real option: kill the child. (See the 41.41 minute point on the first episode.)  
  
So--before the end of the first episode is complete, we're given Crowley's big, and I suspect entirely non-hellish, temptation of Azi. The angel too softhearted to turn Adam and Eve out of the garden because of the cold and the wild animals and Eve already expecting is being asked to kill a child. A child to whom he has stood guardian and Godfather for eleven years. The terms are set, too: can you kill one child to save *everything*? The question will be offered in various ways, and fleshed out more fully, over the extent of the series. We will learn that Crowley himself is unwilling to kill kids. We will watch as Crowley and Azi each try to suggest that the other should do the job. In the semi-demi-hemi resolution of the final episode (an episode lush with cascading resolutions) we will see Azi/Madam Tracy demand Crowley kill the boy because Azi is the nice one--and we will see Crowley lead Azi/Madam Tracy and Witchfinder Sergeant Shadwell, identifying Adam as the child to be killed, and demanding ultimately that Azi kill him. And, as we know, Azi will ultimately agree to the "cold equations." One child dead to save everything. For that, and to save Crowley from the same deed, Azi will kill Adam.

That he is saved from that actually occurring is Madam Tracy's victory, not Azi's. Azi's the one who finally turned against both Heaven and the superficial good, to try to save the world. He embraced the gray of "real politik" to accomplish the nearest thing he could find to a goodness that met HIS OWN criteria, not Heaven's or God's.  
  
In one sense of course, it's classic: the good boy tempted into evil by the bad boy. In another sense, it's the reverse: the stronger of the two characters, the essential leader, makes the only moral choice he can come up with.   
  
And, as he and Crowley later concede, it's just as well for the outcome that neither of them were terribly competent at their rebellion against both Heaven and Hell. the Jokers in God's solitaire deck save everyone without killing the Antichrist.  


But in the process we have come to see Azi "fall" to rise: we've seen him confront Heaven and plead for Earth. We've seen him desert his post in defiance of Heaven's orders. We've seen him possess a human. We've seen him disappear a soldier. And we've seen him prepare to kill a child. Meanwhile we've seen Crowley battle demons, defy Hell, try to save the earth, refuse to kill a child himself, and more.   
  
They are not--and never were--a bad boy and a good boy. They are two blokes coping with God's game of solitaire, and in coping, they have become independent moral beings. No longer looking up or down for commands, but arguing with each other and the entire universe, bickering all the way, as they struggle to find the best compromise they can work out.  
  
They are, like Adam and Eve, two innocents unable to grasp the scope of the universe, making choices above their pay-grade. But that's what makes the final conclusion that groups them with humans rather than with Heaven and Hell completely correct. They may be angel and demon, but what they share in common is that, as angel and demon, they, like everyone else, are "just human," and thus better than either Heaven or Hell incarnate.  
  
But to be that, they had to never actually be the rigid good-bad trope they are disguised as. They have to look like the good boy and the bad boy--but in truth always, always be the two babes in the wood, huddled together on Eden's ramparts, comforting and taking comfort, entirely outside the good-bad paradigm.


End file.
